This film is a tale of joy, rebellion, agony, and triumph – one of many pasts as they intertwine with the many selves of the present. This is a story about choosing kins, defying families, and redefining motherhood. It is a story about change, transformation, and becoming, together with and through the other. Above all, it is a story about love, in its many forms, about the desire to love and the want for love: ‘I was very weak as Toni. Just like a cat, I’d get scared off easily. As Antonella, nothing scares me. I love to love, to be in love and to be loved,’ Antonella’s words linger.

Treat Me Like Your Mother (2025), directed by Lebanese artist, photographer, and filmmaker Mohammad Abdouni, is a photographic documentary that archives, an-archives, and documents the histories of four tanteit/women from Lebanon who share experiences of transfemininity: Em Abed, Jamal Abdo, Antonella, and Mama Jad. This documentary is based on the book Treat Me Like Your Mother: Trans* Histories From Beirut’s Forgotten Past (2022) by Abdouni, co-edited by Joy Stacey and Rayan Abdel Khalek, which tells the stories of 10 trans women and femme men living in Beirut aged between their late thirties and late fifties. This book not only documents and archives trans histories but also pays a homage to our elders whose untold stories make up the fabric of Beirut’s queer past and who have shaped our queer and trans history as we know it, altering it forever.

Mohamad Abdouni’s Treat Me Like Your Mother (2025) asks what some of us dare not ask – what counts as, and is remembered as, history? As Lebanese, we grow up studying different versions of the past in our history schoolbooks. Lebanese memory is pregnant with variations of historical events; what constitutes someone’s sheer truth is a figment of another’s imagination. This film transcribes a collective queer-trans chapter in Lebanese history. It is a seal of presence in the face of failed attempts of queer and trans erasure in Arab histories. This film invites us to ask: how can we expand our definitions of queerness and transness by embracing tante* in all its fluidity and capaciousness against the fixity and rigidity of Western identitarian paradigms?

In his film, Abdouni creates a nostalgic repository of deliberately forgotten histories that are often compulsorily hidden in the margins and pushed out of the frame – in plain sight. He makes way for an enmeshment of life stories, a keepsake of ‘those who came before us,’ which is the title of the film in Arabic. Abdouni weaves family video footage from his own childhood with photographs and videos from the four women’s pasts. He blurs the lines between self and other, director and character, filmmaker and protagonist. When he reflects on his gender exploration through fractions of his upbringing, so do we.

As the women’s youthful photographs sit in the middle of the screen, sometimes accompanied by multi-source background music or unfathomable conversations and overlapping sounds – or an extended track of (static) silence – we are asked to sit with the images. Oftentimes, the consistent blurriness of the image defies our urge to clarify it. The lingering presence of the blurry image remains as is, unrefined, refusing to succumb to our ample attempts at figuring it out and our insatiable appetites to decipher it and make sense of it. The order of the curated photographs denies our plea for linearity and chronology. The deliberate distortion of linearity in and of itself is a queer and trans method of narration, which is clearly evident and consistent throughout the film. These photographs offer glimpses, snapshots in time, a door to someone’s world. They haunt us, not in the classic form of haunting; but rather, they sit with us, perhaps even join us for a cup of coffee on a warm Subhiyyeh**.

This film asks us to listen. To bear witness to faint scars and open wounds. It asks us to turn towards the blue marks of homophobia and transphobia not away from them. It asks us to think of the tantes we know and might know of – those we have briefly met and those we are yet to meet. It asks us to treat them like our mothers, as they wish to be treated. As we listen to the women share glimpses of their motherhood, we are left wondering who gets to be a mother and whose motherhoods get to be celebrated.

– Antonella: ‘We’d wake up in the morning, he’d be sleeping on my chest. Such a pure feeling of motherhood! He’d call me ‘Mama’. I’d start crying.’

– Jamal: ‘I was his mother, his father, and his brother.’

– Mama Jad: ‘That’s how ‘Mama Jad’ came to be… In people’s lives… With their tears and their joy… In everything. That’s something I’ve always been proud of. I’m proud of being a… I dream of being a mother.’

Treat Me Like Your Mother offers a tender depiction of motherhood beyond its conventional parameters as a social role. After all, how can we understand mothering beyond what has been handed down to us? And how can radical friendship become a communal space of healing and catharsis? The film expands, distorts, and rebirths limited understandings of kinship, especially those of mothering to encompass chosen families and mothering oneself. Forming radical friendships through shared experiences of transness and queerness births families and harbours communities that escape the shackles of social expectations.

This film also pays an emotional tribute to the forgotten spaces of Beirut. Those that were once safe havens for all colours of queerness and transness. All the flamboyance of Beirut’s nightlife. The music. The dancing. This film revives the sealed, demolished, and abandoned places that have been tainted by the many layers of Lebanon’s political and economic turmoil. These spaces live on in the voices and photographs of the four women who have seen Beirut in what it once was, and what it’ll always be.

– Jamal: ‘Beirut then and Beirut now?’

– Em Abed: ‘You can’t even compare! I still mourn her soul.’

– Jamal: ‘… Throughout the killings and the bombings. We used to stick together. We used to love one another. There was more love.’

– Mama Jad: ‘It’s not only our crowd that changed. People’s hearts changed. Beirut is still a bride. Despite everything.’

* In The Queer Arab Glossary, edited by Marwan Kaabour, Tante is defined as a fluid category; ‘French for aunt, or elderly and well-respected woman. Can also mean queen, effeminate, pansy or queen, or just an elderly gay man’ (The Queer Arab Glossary, 2024).

** A Subhiyyeh is a traditional Arab custom of having morning coffee with one’s neighbor. It is mostly common among women, and it allows them to bond through spending quality time in each other’s company and finding solace in their shared conversations.

Film review by Salma Yassine